According to The Australian Financial Review, a team of Australian engineers has already developed and flown the next generation of aerospace technology: the scramjet, which enables hypersonic flight.
"Supersonic flight is when you break the speed of sound, and achieve speeds over Mach 1 [1235km/h]," says Professor Michael Smart from the Centre for Hypersonics at The University of Queensland. "Hypersonic flight starts at Mach 5."
Mach 5 is about 6170km/h, but the UQ team has already tested a scramjet at Mach 7.5, or 9260km/h. The team – which shares technology with NASA and was previously in the HIFiRE hypersonics project with the US and Australian governments – has made a total of seven test flights, at Woomera, SA, and in Norway, with three Australian-made scramjets.

According to The Australian Financial Review, Australia’s obsolete car makers could be brought back to life if the government gets behind electric vehicles in 2018 and starts giving drivers incentives to buy them, the Electric Vehicle Council says.
"We have all of the mineral resources to create things like batteries and the componentry that fits within electric vehicles, there's an opportunity for us to have a role in the automotive market," said Behyad Jafari, chief executive of the Electric Vehicle Council, which represents car manufacturers.
The council is pushing for a co-ordinated national plan to encourage and support the purchase of electric vehicles.
Scott Benjamin, the technical director of intelligent transport for engineering design group WSP, says international vehicle makers are importing components for electric vehicles and bolting them together in Australia, but there is interest from local companies in making vehicles here, potentially using 3D printing.
WSP has discussed the potential for local manufacturing with several companies, including French group Navya, which has been running trials of an electric and autonomous "Intellibus" in Perth for the Royal Automobile Club, and US group Local Motors, which has built a 3D printed car.

According to The Australian Financial Review, the Turnbull government is at war over proposed Clean Energy Target but the rapidly falling cost of wind and solar energy could mean developers can do without such targets and their rich subsidies as soon as the early 2020s.
Contrary to former PM Tony Abbott, who argues that pushing renewable energy onto the grid under the Renewable Energy Target (RET) has made power costly and unreliable, rapidly falling prices may now mean that building more wind and solar is the key to bringing wholesale electricity prices down.
That offers the tantalising prospect that Australia can meet the energy "trilemma" – restoring affordable and reliable energy and meeting the nation's commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – with a mix of wind, solar, gas, storage and "demand response". Demand response offers customers incentives to curb their demand and send energy from solar panels, batteries and smart appliances when demand spokes, helping to avoid blackouts.
AGL Energy has outlined such a future in its plan to replace the ageing Liddell coal power station in the NSW Hunter Valley. But Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull remains unconvinced and deputy PM Barnaby Joyce is openly hostile.
There are still obstacles to financing a 25-year project like a wind or solar farm without subsidies. And wind and solar power need to be backed by dispatchable capacity that can be turned on and off at will – which will be increasingly costly as penetration rises and drives out baseload coal power.
Still, the dramatic shift in debate from only a few months ago – when Mr Turnbull canvassed building new coal-fired power stations – shows how swiftly energy markets are changing.

According to The Australian Financial Review, Rio Tinto has successfully sent a driverless iron ore train almost 100 kilometres across the Pilbara in what the company says is the first fully autonomous heavy haul train journey ever completed in Australia.
The pilot run of the miner's new autonomous rail system, called AutoHaul, between the Pilbara towns of Tom Price and Paraburdoo marks the first time a Rio train has travelled without driver assistance or a driver monitoring from on board.
The Autohaul project, which envisages converting almost all of Rio's 200 Pilbara locomotives into driverless mode, was approved in 2012 with a $US518 million budget. After a number of technical setbacks, the project is running more than two years behind schedule and is estimated to be significantly over budget. It is now expected to be completed by the end of 2018.
"This successful pilot run puts us firmly on track to meet our goal of operating the world's first fully autonomous heavy haul, long distance rail network, which will unlock significant safety and productivity benefits for the business," Rio Tinto iron ore chief executive Chris Salisbury said.
"Gains from AutoHaul are already being realised including reduced variability and increased speed across the network, helping to reduce average cycle times."
Rio's trains started running in autonomous mode in the first quarter of 2017 and about 50 per cent of the rail kilometres travelled by its fleet are now completed in autonomous mode with drivers on board.

According to The Australian Financial Review, Google Home, the smart music speaker that you command with your voice and can use to control devices around your house, is finally coming to Australia.
The speaker, Google's answer to the surprisingly successful Amazon Echo, will be available from Thursday, July 20, for $199.
The Australian version of Google Home has been designed to understand Australian accents, and will speak back to householders using an Australian accent, too.
Australia is just the fourth country where Google has released a localised version home, after launching it in the USA last October, followed by the UK and Canada.
The device, which is just 14 cms high (and much smaller than it tends to look in photographs), is based around Google's artificial intelligence engine, Google Assistant, which can answer spoken queries such as "OK Google, where is the nearest servo?", and which unlike Apple's Siri can follow the thread of a conversation, so users can ask followup questions such as "OK Google, how long would it take me to walk there?".
At launch, the Australian version of Google Home will support Stan, Netflix and YouTube on Chromecast-enabled televisions, meaning householders will be able to turn on their TVs and have them start playing movies and shows, all with their voice.
As many as six Google accounts can be programmed into each Google Play device, allowing householders to do things like check their calendar, just by barking commands like "OK Google, what do I have on today" across the room. Cricket, football (soccer) and AFL scores will also be read out by the tiny speaker on command.
Smart home devices such as the Philips Hue lighting system and Linksys's Wemo system are also supported, so householders will be able to turn lights and power points on and off with just their voice.

According to The Australian Financial Review, Transgrid, the NSW transmission monopoly, will install Tesla Powerpack batteries at sites around NSW to help smooth the intermittent supply of wind and solar energy and trial "demand response" – a method of avoiding blackouts and moderating prices.
The first installation of a 250 kilowatt, 500KW/h Powerpack will be at the City of Sydney's Alexandra Canal Works depot in the coming months.
An immediate response is needed because wholesale power prices have virtually doubled in the past five years, forcing some energy-hungry heavy industry to the brink of closure and adding to the hip-pocket pressure on households.
Demand response is a process where customers are offered financial incentives to curb their power usage at times of peak grid demand and send surplus power from solar panels, batteries, smart thermostats on energy-hungry airconditioners, pool pumps and electric vehicle chargers back to the grid to help avoid blackouts.
TransGrid chief executive Paul Italiano said demand management deployed at scale would help to relieve stress during peak demand around the Sydney CBD. Demand management could also reduce or defer the capital expenditure on TransGrid's electricity network, ultimately reducing the cost of bills. The batteries are managed remotely and in real time by TransGrid.
Demand management is one of the measures that experts hope can restore stability to the fragile power grid and keep heavy industry here, and software firms and some retailers are already running their own trials.
The Powerpack battery will be discharged when network congestion occurs in metropolitan Sydney. To minimise bills, charging the battery at night and discharging during the day will reduce the site load during peak hours. The batteries can also be used to maximise use of onsite solar PV generation.
The trial will also help TransGrid understand how much the solar PV output of the site can vary across the day and to how much to dispatch accordingly.
Such a trial could provide further insight into the potential for larger-scale battery installations across the grid.

According to The Australian Financial Review, GHD, a major engineering and construction company in Australia, cut 80 per cent off the cost of inspecting a bridge for Queensland Rail using a drone.
Using the drone with its fixed camera, the GHD engineer was able to take 21,000 images of the ageing steel structure spanning a creek, permitting the single-span bridge to remain open, rather than having to close it for the five or six days needed for a full inspection by humans.
"When you combine that with artificial intelligence, you can teach the software what to look for," Bugeja says. "So when we're doing inspections, you can say to the software, 'This is what a crack looks like', or 'This is what corrosion looks like'. The software starts to learn what we are looking for."
The technology is even more valuable when images the drone-mounted camera takes and the notes the consultant makes – typically resulting in a report stretching for hundreds of pages – are attached to a 3D model of the bridge, and allow engineers and their clients to study them from a desktop, or even in the field on a tablet.
"So rather than handing over a 540-page report and condition assessment, the client can just open up the model, they'll see a highlighted part of the model where there's an issue, they'll see a high-definition image of that state, and the comments associated with it," Bugeja says.
While drones and cameras can help in the construction of new buildings by photographing ground surfaces and measuring topography ahead of detailed design, they can arguably be more valuable in long-term asset maintenance. It's not just bridges, but inspecting the inside of exhaust stacks at power plants.

According to The Australian Financial Review, Telstra is trying to integrate artificial intelligence into the platform, and then the app will automatically manage appliances, heating, cooling and lighting to make sure a home is running at peak efficiency.
Telstra executive John Chambers uses his Smart Home app to check that his teenage girls aren’t sneaking their boyfriends into the house. If his 19-year-old son opens the liquor cabinet he also gets a video notification (“He gets into it far too often”).
Surveys show 80 per cent of Australians worry about leaving a light or appliance on when they go away. Telstra is banking on Australians soon adding a $25-a-month Smart Home plan when they bundle up their mobile and broadband services.
And even if watching and controlling your home from your mobile doesn’t go mainstream, the service could become essential for the elderly and disabled.
“You’ll be able to see when your mum is opening the fridge and how is she moving around the house, a whole variety of very simple non-invasive techniques just to keep an eye on your ageing parents,” Chambers says.
“We’re working on solutions to adapt it to the 500,000 homes of Australians with a disability, and how they’ll be able to simply use the lighting features, heating features and automated locks and, also bring in new devices that meet their specific needs.”

According to The Australian Financial Review, a treatment for peanut allergy that promises to allow children to eat peanuts as part of their regular diet has become the first recipient of funding from the federal government's Biomedical Translation Fund (BTF).
Prota Therapeutics has been spun out of the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, where Professor Mimi Tang has development an allergy treatment that combines a daily probiotic drink with dried peanut flour sprinkled into an allergy sufferer's breakfast.
An initial trial of 62 children with peanut allergy showed that after taking the treatment for 18 months, 82 per cent proved resistant to anaphylactic shock when resuming peanut consumption, six weeks after the trial ended.
The new injection of $10 million, which is half from the BTF and half in matching funds from venture capital firm OneVentures, will fund an expanded trial where 200 children will be tested on an improved formulation, which it is hoped can sustain tolerance to peanuts for six months and beyond.
The study will also compare the effects of combining probiotics with the ingestion of peanut flour, with the ingestion of peanut flour alone.
Chief executive Suzanna Lipe said "In addition to the importance of new treatments and diagnostics themselves, commercialising break-through medical research provides Australia with new highly-skilled jobs, the opening of significant export opportunities, increased capacity and capabilities in the Australian life sciences sector, and a boost to the economy as a whole."

According to The Australian Financial Review, in the US, Tesla has a calculator that helps home owners estimate the size and cost of replacing their roof. Australians don't get access, but Tesla has suggested that home owners can expect to pay about $US21.85 ($29.30) per square foot for the solar roof, fully installed.
Australian and American roofing can be quite different, with variable build methods, regulations and environment – such as snow. But it's a good place to start. Keep in mind that Tesla is targeting high end roof tiles, not the budget variety or steel roofing.
$US21.85 US per square foot equates to $US235 per square metre, or $318 per square metre at current exchange rates to the Australian dollar.
Tesla suggests that at the $US21.85 US price, the ongoing solar generation over 30 years makes the roof cost competitive with a normal roof.
Pricing depends on a huge number of factors, but an average roof in Australia, fully installed, ranges from about $80 a square metre on the low end, to $130 a square metre for higher end products such as terracotta tiles.
Still, Tesla is targeting the higher end, so let's use the $130 a square metre figure. That means the Tesla solar roof is about 2.5 times more expensive than a comparable — but not solar — roof.
Using a large single Australian home as an example, it could have a 300-square metre roof — similar sizes are used for the Tesla price example. That's $39,000 worth to replace with a normal roof, or $95,400 if installing a Tesla Solar roof. That means the Tesla roof is $56,400 more expensive.
So 35 per cent solar on a large Australian home with a 300 square metre roof is about equivalent to a 10 kW solar array. According to Solar Choice, that will net us at least 40 kWh or so a day, depending on location. Solar output drops over time, but the house should generate 400,000 kWh or so over its life.
That means that each kWh produced needs to be sold for, or save the household, about $0.14 per kWh for the cost to break even. Houses with high direct solar use might achieve the savings, but it's well above the $0.08 or so per kWh from feed-in credits.
An array to generate the same 10 kWh as the example Tesla roof above costs an average of $14,675 in Australia, according to Solar Choice. Darwin actually bumps that average up a lot, so $14,000 is closer for most of us.
So a normal roof plus normal solar on the example home from above costs about $53,000, versus the $95,000 for the Tesla roof. That means the Tesla Solar Roof isn't double the cost, but is a lot more expensive for the same solar capabilities.
As a comparison, over a 25-year life (Australian solar panels typically have a shorter warranty), the solar panels should make at least 333,000 kWh. That gives a break even saved cost per kWh of about $0.04 – half most grid feed ins.